Homes Inside Houses: Pictures of a Multi-Home Mega-House

By Dornob Staff

Blending big and small, modern forms and cultural norms, this design project is part multifamily housing complex and part meta-home – a series of unique living spaces packed inside of a larger structure made to look like a conventional A-frame house on the outside (albeit made of creative and unconventional materials), and a cutting-edge converted industrial loft space within.

HyoMan Kim of IROJE KHM Architects has created something almost like a self-contained mini-city, complete with outdoor passages, horizontal gardens and vertical circulation spaces. These serve as places of interaction for residents who each individually occupy a part inside of the whole. Alternating layers of transparent and opaque material allow selective views and opportunities to look out while still inside, balanced with maintaining security and privacy within each unit.

The plans and sections show a surprisingly limited amount of space, the complexity of which is only fully comprehensible in the supporting photos. Inside and out, there is a sense of diversity within unity – careful attention to personal experience is visible in each detail and despite the fact that the same (relatively cheap metal and glass) building materials are used throughout. If you lived here, you would feel your unit was personalized, unique and elegant – not just a knock-off of the rest.

All of these strategies successfully lowered overall construction costs and made maximum use of each available square foot, but without compromising the integrity of each home-within-a-house built into this strange super-sized structure. The result is a series of homes that both adhere to a culture and traditional of Korean home building but also avoid seeming dated or constrained on a limited urban plot.